My May 2013 book sales are in, and the results are not good. I’ve experienced a precipitous decline in sales.
I sold 3 books and the launch of BILLY GRIST was a thorough bomb. I could not even give away copies of BILLY GRIST. I did an Amazon.com 5-day freebie with advertising, listings, etc. and got a whopping 88 downloads. Poor W4$ used to get thousands

I could blame the Amazon.com algorithm or some other crazy factor for my poor sales, but I think something else is going on here…My books suck. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think they totally suck, especially BILLY GRIST, but they suck enough not to sell, which to me is the definition of sucking enough. I say this because I consider sales the only true means of assessing a book’s value. (The Forbucks only do things that make money.)

So…all that I can do is write better books, which I intend to do. Until then I’m crawling into my writing cave for when you’re an independent author it makes little sense to market books that aren’t good enough to cause word-of-mouth sales.

So…W4$ fan(s) look for THE GENERAL STORE some time in 2013 and THE AGITATION OF RENNY SNEED in 2014. They will be better books, for sure. Good enough to sell? Who knows, but that’s part of the fun!

Hey, don’t give up! Yoou’re going through a bad patch. Your writing is good, the humour is great – perhaps your reading public, those who picked up The Walking Man, are not the same ones who would appreciate your satire and humour about other subjects – look at what happened after The Life of Brian (film) was released, the Pythons came in for a lot of stick for satirising religion yet the film is a classic. Even now, though, a lot of people regard it as the devil’s work. There are some strange people around. Billy Grist was a brave venture into humour with satire of religious belief at its core and it was always going to be controversial. Just because it is not popular with everyone doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Maybe it needs a different audience than those who bought the other books.

You can only say that sales are a means of assessing a book’s value if your book reached the people who would appreciate it and they turn it down. I’ve recently read a book by someone who is doing well in sales and quite frankly his writing sucks. Yours doesn’t. There could be any number of reasons for falling sales but don’t give up writing, you’re too good at it for that.